As a follow up to the questions about plagiarism that we raised in our post here, I received a reply from James, who runs Japan Probe.

James is currently on vacation and he tells us that he wrote the article in question on August 9th, and put it into an auto post queue to go up while he was gone. He tells us he had never heard of Otaku International before, and that he plans to contact them “about the content they stole” when he gets back from his trip.

I still have not heard anything from Otaku International.

Ran across some strange happenings in webdom the other day, something that really has us scratching our heads over here at the International JAPUNDIT Media Complex.

Over on Otaku International, there is a post dated August 11, 2008 titled Apparantly some Foreigners are more Japanese than Japanese People, which contains the passage:

The first foreign featured is Ivan Orkin, an American chef who owns and operates Ivan Ramen, a noodle restaurant in Tokyo. In addition to making great ramen. Ivan takes time every day to travel around his neighborhood greeting local shopkeepers, a polite gesture that makes him “more Japanese” to others.

The second foreigner is Jenya, a Russian girl that is a minor celebrity in Akihabara, where she apparently does some tour guide stuff. The reporter is very impressed with her Japanese, noting that she even writes mobile phone mails in Japanese instead of English. She says that she has passed level 2 of the Japanese language proficiency test. The report then contains some information about the JLPT.

The next part of the report focuses on a Brazilian man who is very knowledgeable about kanji and traditional Japanese sayings. Having lived in Japan for just 9 years, he is able to answer questions that many Japanese cannot answer after having lived their entire lives here. And at the end of the segment, Ivan and the Brazilian guy comment on things they like about Japan. The Brazilian guy is fond of the kindness and consideration Japanese people show towards others. Ivan particularly likes the phrase otsukaresama, which is used to recognize the hard work of others.

Contrast this with the following passage, which is from a post over on Japan Probe, which is dated August 12, 2008 and titled Foreigners who are more Japanese than Japanese people:

The first foreign featured is Ivan Orkin, an American chef who owns and operates Ivan Ramen, a noodle restaurant in Tokyo. In addition to making great ramen, Ivan takes time every day to travel around his neighborhood greeting local shopkeepers - a polite gesture that makes him “more Japanese” than the average young person in Japan these days. For more info on Ivan, check out this Wall Street Journal article.

The second foreigner is Jenya, a Russian girl that is a minor celebrity in Akihabara, where she apparently does some tour guide stuff. The reporter is very impressed with her Japanese, noting that she even writes mobile phone mails in Japanese instead of English. She says that she has passed level 2 of the Japanese language proficiency test. The report then contains some information about the JLPT, demonstrating some of the difficult questions that are found on the test.

The next part of the report focuses on a Brazilian man who is very knowledgeable about kanji and traditional Japanese sayings. Having lived in Japan for just 9 years, he is able to answer questions that many Japanese cannot answer after having lived their entire lives here.

At the end of the segment, Ivan and the Brazilian guy comment on things they like about Japan. The Brazilian guy is fond of the kindness and consideration Japanese people show towards others. Ivan particularly likes the phrase otsukaresama, which is used to recognize the hard work of others.

Now I wrote directly to Japan Probe and to Otaku International yesterday asking about the obvious similarities between the two posts (even the typos are duplicated), but neither has responded. The Otaku International post is dated earlier, but that really does not mean anything since dates can be specified as desired.

So I guess we are all left with the unanswered question: Who exactly is ripping off whom?

Nippon Television Network Corp. (NTV) has gotten into hot water for inflating the number of plates of food downed by “a celebrity known for her enormous appetite” during an NTV program.

According to NTV, the woman devoured “only” 39 plates of food, though it was reported on the program that she had eaten 48.

“We failed to accurately count the number of plates, and partially used an inappropriate method to make the segment,” the TV station said in an apology during the program on Friday.

NTV’s general public relations department explained, “We were vague about how we counted the plates and dishes, for instance, counting one plate with four pieces of the same dish as four dishes.”

On Monday, NTV gave severe warnings to Hisao Adachi, head of the news bureau, and other program staff, and terminated a contract with a production company in charge of shooting and making the problem segment.

Celebrity gluttons are really popular in Japan, which is why I guess something like this is being treated so seriously.

A restaurant located at the Naokata City, Fukuoka prefecture government office building has added a new Oppai Lunch (Breast Lunch) to their menu to mark the release of the movie Oppai Volley (Breast Volleyball), which was shot in the city.

The Oppai Lunch consists of two cups of breast-shaped chicken rice with strategically placed green peas, and includes vegetables, a bowl of soup, and flag for 500 yen (milk separate).

Via The Road to the Deep East

The Road to the Deep East is reporting some interesting background on the story the other day about a Japan Foreign Ministry official who is being accused of staying at a Tokyo hotel for 300 days and skipping out on his 15-million-yen tab.

As strange as this story was, people here generally were quick to shrug the whole affair off as just another instance of some corrupt bureaucrat’s sense of self-importance running amok.

According to The Road to the Deep East, however, things are not as simple as they appear.

Former wife to Indonesian leader Sukarno and current Japanese media celebrity Dewi Sukarno is apparently reporting on her Japanese blog that the Foreign Ministry official in question (who is married) had been having an affair with the female president of the hotel in question for the past six or seven years. Apparently the hotel president is very much in love with the official, but he refused to leave his wife and ended up splitting with the hotelier instead.

According to Dewi, the hotel president is using the claim for 115 million yen to punish the official by publicly embarrassing him.

Check out The Road to the Deep East for even more dirt on this story.

The Onion seems to think so. . . Be sure to watch past the ad at the end for a bonus clip.

The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?

Japan through the eyes of a drifter camped in a shantytown near one of Tokyo’s trendiest areas.

Thanks to Xeni Jardin.

Between studying Japanese for four years at SDSU and living here for 17, I’ve pretty much got the Japanese language down. I’ve actually forgotten a large part of what I studied over the years, especially written kanji, since the great convenience of computers that let you select the right character by hitting the space bar means that almost no one writes kanji as well as they used to, including both Japanese and foreigners like me.

Although I’m functionally fluent in the language, I’ve learned something odd — it’s often better to speak English in some situations.

The other day I was at the public bath with my son (it’s called Yura no Sato, which translates as “Village of Hot Water Relaxation”) when one of the other bathers struck up a conversation with me, asking me where I was from. He’d just finished an interesting trip around the world, visiting China, the Middle East and Europe, and was planning on going to the U.S. next.

While my long years of studying tempted me to speak Japanese with him, instead I spoke only English, since I knew that getting to practice his language skills would really make the man’s day. Speaking English instead of Japanese can open doors that might not otherwise open for you.

Once I was speaking with a Japanese female airline employee at a ticket counter about about the possibility of an upgrade to business class, and I received a somewhat cold reaction to my suggestion when I spoke in Japanese to her. I decided to ask at another counter run by the same airline, this time speaking polite English and batting my “gaijin Bambi eyes” as best I could, and darned if I didn’t get that upgrade.

My wife tells me that if I want to yell at someone for something, it’s much more effective to do it in English — it seems that angry words just carry more impact in English than in Japanese.

Click here to read a first-hand account of a blogger who was on hand during some of the demonstrations currently going on in South Korea against the importation of U.S. beef. Fascinating stuff.

Found via The Marmot’s Hole.

Check out this post over at Occidentalism,which takes gaijin - turned - Japanese - national Debito Arudo (David Aldwinckle) to task and then some for “race hustling” and spreading misinformation about Japan that eventually has a negative effect on foreigners who live here.

It even contains a video by a young gaijin woman who apologizes (in Japanese) for an earlier video in which she accused Japanese of racism towards foreigners, based on what she read on Debito’s sight.

Debito has a lot of misinformation on his site, especially regarding the extent of racism and manifestations of racism in Japan. The girl in the youtube below is an American living in Japan, and is an English teacher studying Japanese in her spare time. She been posting video blogs on youtube for sometime, and thanks to the fact that she is a white girl that is trying to speak Japanese, she gathered a Japanese following.

At some point she came across Debito’s site and decided to give a speech on youtube about human rights and Japanese racism towards foreigners in Japan. In her summary of the video, she included a link from Debito.org. The selection of topics are all from Debito’s site so it is obvious that she got her “opinions” from there.

A must read. . .

Via Japan News Junkie

Though I have been really critical of Michelle Wie in the past (here and here), I must admit that I ended feeling pretty sorry for the young girl after her most recent mishap on the golf course when she was disqualified from a golf tournament for signing her scorecard “too late.”

Wie said that after she finished her round on Friday, she left the tent where players sign their scorecards and was chased down by some of the volunteers working in the tent who pointed out she hadn’t signed.

Wie returned to the tent and signed the card.

“I thought it would be OK,” she said.

But Wie, according to Witters, had already walked outside the roped-off area around the tent. At that point, the mistake was final.

Witters said she and other tour officials didn’t learn about the error from volunteers until well after Wie teed off Saturday. They let her finish the round, then took her to the office where she and her caddy, Tim Vickers, were informed of the ruling.

Wie was in second place, only one shot back, when she was disqualified.

We all have heard of how foot binding was (and apparently still is in some areas) practiced in China, but these are the first photos I have ever seen of this gruesome practice.

More here.

according to an article in the new york times online,written by norimitsu onishi, the ashes in a japanese urn are an apt metaphor for the future of the system of funeral buddhism in the country.

where as in the past, the japanese reliably counted on buddhist priest’s and their rituals as a source of comfort during the time surrounding the death of a loved one, many now are choosing to go with services provided funeral homes or cremations with no services at all (preferring instead to dump their loved one’s remains in the nearest ashtray and keep their kaimyo in the toilet in case they need something to aim at when they’re drunk).

photo of a priest staring disinterestedly at a wall, hat tip to the old grey lady

while there are a myriad of reasons for this shift in attitudes towards death and the proper place of religion during this time, to numerous to be discussed in detail here, there are a few notable trends listed in the articles.

1) the accelerated drop in religious belief in the cities combined with their ever increasing populations has led to a large group of people who have no religious belief whatsoever and see no need to start on the day of their death.

2) the rural demographic, where until recently buddhism was still strong, is aging and dying off as the younger generations move to cities and the birthrates are not enough to make up for the exodus of population and businesses. this leaves country temples serving an ever dwindling number of less affluent elderly to serve, thus making many temples financially insecure.

3) the sense of japanese that buddhism doesn’t cater to the needs of the living, thus making them more indifferent to what it teaches about what happens after death; and the lack of change in that area the clerics seem to want to make in this regard.

4) a lack of moral authority apparent in the buddhist temples since the end of wwii when they began to sell prestigious posthumous names to people who paid them enough money, thus denigrating names once reserved for revered buddhist adherents with strong moral characters to an indulgence of sorts. as appropriate in situations like these payments are usually made in unmarked in envelopes on a no receipt-cash only basis.

5) the general expense of traditional funerals combined with new rent a priests employed by funeral homes to provide services for people they most likely have never met before and willing to provide honest listings of fraudulent extravagant titles that can be attained at rock bottom prices and you get a receipt.

all these factors are combining together to create an a daunting challenge to the continuing existence of temples across the country. with funeral expenses being analogous in importance to these temples as tithing is to churches and synagogues in the west in terms of revenue sources, many priests face being the last generation of clerics ministering their religion in japan.

as a consequence many temples are expected to close their doors over the coming decades, taking with them (they claim) a major source of local history and sense of community and continuity in their local precincts. of course some of the major private and state sponsored temples and unesco tourists sites will be unaffected, but many charming repositories of small town rural culture will be disappearing. so if you always wanted to visit that one out of the way zen garden that somehow escaped being listed in the travel guides and is free of tourists, now might be a good time.

soon places like this might be overgrown memories of a different age

few random closing thoughts…
a) what’s going to happen to all the libraries of coin lockers supposedly holding parishioners souls? talk about a crappy afterlife, you’re closed in a hole in the wall until the local priest can’t make ends meet and then bulldozed; lame.

b) i find it darkly humorous that the priests see many of the sources of their decline, recognize they are preventable, and then do nothing. this lethargy in response to their situation seems to come from a certain amount of apathy about their beliefs. they talk about how other religions provide sermons and community services outside of funerals to keep their faith relevant to their congregations as if it would be some theoretically nice thing to do, and then take no action to emulate. has buddhism in japan become this esoteric that it no longer has an application in people’s daily lives? i suspect that it’s just laziness on the part of the priests

c) perhaps this is just the logical conclusion to japan’s seeming cognitive dissonance on the issue of religion. after all if you don’t believe in it and didn’t live your life according to its precepts and went to your death this way, how would having an extravagant funeral change this? it you believe that human existence ends when the lungs stop breathing, the heart stops beating, and the neurons stop firing signals through their dendrites why waste your money to commemorate, dedicate, exalt, and provide a home for a soul you don’t even believe exists? and if you do believe in a deity or higher power of some sort exists, do you really think that a life spent living in sin and unbelief can be made up for by having a really cool name and a nice funeral? i guess these types of services are more for the living, but if that’s true why not remember the dead in your own way? it would be a lot more meaningful and cost effective than spending over ten thousand dollars for a piece of lacquered wood and empty platitudes from some guy who never even met the deceased.

d) think of the boon to the horror movie industry. decrepit buildings, abandoned alters, moss covered statues, rooms with soul lockers; this will be great!

A ceremony was held today to mark the beginning of construction work of the 610-meter Tokyo Sky Tree, which is scheduled for completion in 2012.

Tokyo Sky Tree will commence operation in the spring of 2012. NHK and the five major commercial broadcasters are currently using the 333-meter-tall Tokyo Tower to transmit both analogue and digital TV signals. But analogue broadcasting will be terminated by July 2011. In view of the change, the six broadcasters have drawn up plans for the new tower to be tall enough to transmit digital signals unobstructed by high-rise buildings.

Check out this video in which Oiwan Lam talks about how China pays people to go onto blogs and into chatrooms to tout the party line.

Via Danwei

More on this story here.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as 280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious China’s leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More importantly, they offer tangible clues about China’s next generation of information controls—what President Hu Jintao last month called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

It’s official! Osaka prefecture has been declared the sexual assault capital of Japan according to statistics maintained by Japan’s National Police Agency.

According to the data, last year one in every 4,200 female residents of Osaka was raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. This compares to one in every 4,600 in Tokyo.

The Osaka rate is double that of Kanagawa Prefecture, which has a similar number of female residents, and nearly five times that of Yamagata Prefecture, which is the safest prefecture for women in Japan.

According to the police, many victims of rape or other sexual assault last year lived alone in apartments. Most of them were attacked from behind soon after opening the door of their apartment. Some offenders managed to enter buildings equipped with auto-lock systems by waiting for a resident to open the door, and then hid in stairwells until they found a target.

Many victims also were attacked on the street while talking on their cell phone, an activity police said can give people a false sense of security about their personal safety.

“People let their guard down when they are on their way home, or talking to people [who they feel close to]. It’s the most dangerous moment,” a police officer said.

So what steps has Osaka taken to deal with the situation? Well, the prefectural police force has assigned two full-time female police officers to a telephone consultation service called Woman Line.

Feel any safer?

In the mid-1960s when I was a Tokyo-based trade journalist I wrote that a growing number of Americans were being influenced by positive elements in Japan’s traditional culture and were approaching the cultural sophistication that the Japanese had reached by the 10th century.

In that instance I was referring to the arts, crafts, food, poetry, literature, entertainment and sexual practices. But in the following two decades Japan’s influence on the United States was to go well beyond these areas and become a serious national problem.

By the mid-1970s many segments of American industry were being threatened with extinction by the overwhelming power of Japan’s economic juggernaut, and it was not until then that American business leaders began to pick up on the Japanese concepts of kaizen (continuous improvement), kanban (just in time parts delivery), hinshitsu (quality), miryokuteki hinshitsu (quality with sex appeal), yugo ka (fuzzy thinking), and other Japanese practices.

In The Japanese Influence on America, a book I wrote in the early 1980s, I described the impact that Japan was having on American management and manufacturing processes—both of which had become obsolete and had already relegated many segments of American industry to the trash dump of history—and recommended practical steps for American manufacturers to take in order to not only cope with but to benefit from the Japanese challenge.

Now, the influence of Japanese culture on the U.S. has gone well-beyond beyond management and manufacturing processes, eating sushi, and singing in karaoke bars—all of which have their very positive sides.

On the other hand, we also seem to be hung up on adopting some of the worst elements of Japan’s traditional culture. . .elements which the Japanese themselves are actually in the process of giving up.

The outmoded elements of Japanese culture that Americans are importing include behavior that is based on policies instead of principles, and hiding behind facades (tatemae) rather than telling the truth up front (honne). Both American businessmen and politicians have become masters of the tatemae approach.

More and more Americans are now also emulating Japan’s traditional approach to human sexuality by condoning and celebrating it. Like the Japanese of old, we now elevate prostitutes and pornographers to star status. But we do not have the structure or restraints that were built into the Japanese way and kept it under control.

Our whole economy is driven by the exploitation of sex, especially female sexuality, and sexual behavior has become a kind of free-for-all, with the only restraints being the time and place—and even these are often ignored. And not surprisingly, this element of American culture has been adopted by most other developed and developing countries in the world—driving home the old adage that sex sells.

Today’s over-emphasis on female sexuality obviously derives from the efforts of religions to mask, suppress and deny the sexuality of females—a male ploy designed to keep women on the bottom.

I am all for emancipation from the ancient religious view of human sexuality that has brought unimaginable suffering to the Western world. . .but it needs to be de-commercialized and humanized.

There are still many positive things to learn from the Japanese, including their use of both sides of their brains (the rational side and the emotional side), which contributes to their extraordinary design sense and their appreciation of beauty.

______________________
Boyé Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan and East Asia since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, business journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on Japan, Korea and China. For synopses of his titles go to: www.cultural-guide-books-on-china-japan-korea-mexico.com.

The New York Times has a report about Huang Qi, a Chinese human rights advocate who, ironically told National Public Radio recently that there have been great improvements in the human rights situation in China.

BEIJING — Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Mr. Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Mr. Huang soon posted an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools’ construction and for those responsible for the building’s collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Mr. Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.

“They’ve been using this method for a long time,” said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Mr. Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Mr. Zhang said, “It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died.”

There is no official death toll for the children who died in schools during the Shichuan Province earthquake on May 12. According to estimates by the Chinese government, seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed.

“One day, I discovered three kernels of corn in a small pile of cow dung, picked them up and cleaned them with my sleeve before eating [them]. As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day.”

More here.